Freud and Da Vinci

Updated on April 25, 2013

In 1910 Freud wrote an article about a very influential figure in the Italian Renaissance: Leonardo Da Vinci.

I have to say that this new address to an artist from psychoanalysis has then its deviations, to the fact that it has made a "psychoanalysis of art", or to the point of interpreting the artist from his work.

Freud dared not interfere in these matters not with any artist ...leonardo-da-vinciMaybe it was the enigma of his figure which led Freud to talk about it.

The issue today is that the relationship between psychoanalysis and art are spelled differently. is the artist who teaches the analyst, who is ahead, says Lacan, in his tribute to Marguerite Duras.

But Freud addressed this relationship with art from his theory, of course.

The same in his "Treatise on Painting" compares the painter with the sculptor. In the latter says that unlike, always full of dust, even seems a baker ... While the painter always sitting with his brush flailing against his work, comfortable and well dressed ...

Freud sees this he wrote in a first moment of his life, and that after having been driven from Milan by Ludovico Sforza (nicknamed the Moor) had a wandering life, with little success.

He settled in France was abandoning his art, which further separated him from his contemporaries. He became interested in "scientific research" that some branded him a "black magic".

It was going very slowly so their paint jobs, even left his works unfinished ...

Freud says that Leonardo seemed indifferent to good and evil, which had female attitudes that forced Freud to talk about it: Leonardo was repulsed by female sexuality, even doubt that his biographers have ever been with a woman, but consider not had any crush.

He was suspected of homosexuality, denounced it, but later acquitted. Suspicions arose from having as a young model "dubious fame." Note that is surrounded by beautiful teenagers and young people who took as disciples, to the point that one of them accompanied him to France and was with him Ghasta his death was in fact his sole heir.

The issue is that beyond this, and fights his biographers, Da Vinci was never attributed to intense sexual life.

Freud believes that this has to do with that Da Vinci became their passion in eager to know, that his affections had a destiny that was to research, and that there full sublimated sexual energy ...

Freud believed, for his theory of infantile sexuality, that once this time research on childhood sexuality, sexual repression there, and this leads to three types of inhibitions and puts the case of Da Vinci in the third " type "which clarifies: sexual repression fails to derive all the unconscious libido and sublimation there is research that libido, very intense indeed.